The City of Dreams -- Part 14

[I started this next section with the idea that Brie and Perry needed to do something fun together.  Other than that, I didn't really know where it was going, and it caught me a bit by surprise.  Hope you enjoy it.

[Oh!  Also, I've gone and purchased the desktop version of Write or Die.  Still love it, and now I can write while I'm offline.  Or die.  One or the other.  $10 very well spent.  Thanks, Write or Die!]



"Hey," I said.
"Come on," said Brie, nodding her head down the road and starting walking.
"Wait.  I wanted to tell you something."
Brie turned back to look at me but kept walking backwards.  "No time, Perry.  It's time to do something fun."  She turned back away and started running.
"What do we do for fun in the City?" I asked the air.
"I do all kinds of things," said Not.  "I watch you.  Watch other people.  Watch them eat.  Watch those Hispanics painting thirty-two rooftops into a mural of Super Man--"
"Thanks," I interrupted, "but what do I do for fun?"
"Follow Brie and find out," suggested the abandoned dream.
I shrugged to myself.  "I guess following Brie is fun."
She'd slowed down, looking back to see if I was coming.  I decided I was, and started running.  Talking could wait for another time, especially since I didn't know what I was going to say.  I just knew it would be better than any of the things I said when I was awake.  I waved her ahead, she smiled, pointed down another street with both hands, and took off running again.
"I run way more when I'm asleep than when I'm awake," I said.
"Exercise is good for you," said Not.
"Even when I'm asleep?"
"Probably," he said.
"Not," I finished for him.  "Where were you when I was talking with Mrs. Humphrey?"
"Reading.  She has the most amazing collection of books in that house.  Oddly enough, the stories all have the same title, even though the insides are all different.  It's the craziest thing."
I was curious, but I was out of breath for questions, so I kept running.  Brie was a solid half-block ahead of me and I had longer legs, but not by much.  Also, I suspected she actually exercised on occasion.  Not that I couldn't run--I'd proved that with the light posts--but I certainly wasn't my sister.  Any of my sisters.  Fortunately for my nerves, the light posts in this part of town were the tame, yellowish variety, most of them staying in one place, though I did have to skirt around the edge of a white-picket fence that was being firmly turned away by a bearded man.  It seemed he didn't need TWO fences for his small plot of grass and flowers.
After another block Brie let me catch up with her--I didn't have any illusions about being faster than she was--but she kept us jogging.
"Where?" I got out, trying to not sound too out of breath.
"Are we going?" she finished, a little out of breath herself.  "Not far."
I tried to get any kind of bearing on which direction we were headed, but I still knew next to nothing about the geography of the City.  I also didn't know where we had started from, whether there was a north or south in this place, or even if the city stayed the same from night to night.  For all I knew, the City of Dreams was never the same place twice.  Actually, from what I knew, that seemed most likely of all.
We ran down a street where the ground floor of every building was a store front for a new letter of the alphabet.  We jogged past THE A STORE, B STORE, C'S UNLIMITED, and D, INC., all the way through Z DEPOT.  Then there was a store for some letter that was a vague cross between the letter L and a jolt of electricity.  I stopped trying to see the letters after the next one growled at me.
"Really almost there," said Brie, and we turned another corner.  "There."
I slowed down, and she slowed down with me.  "The freeway?"
"Exactly."
"Why are we at the freeway?" I gasped, stopping to put my hands on my knees.
"Put your hands on your head instead," Brie suggested, showing me by example.  We won't discuss what that did to the hang of her hoodie, but I followed her example.   "And this is the place where the freeways meet."
That, at least, was hard to argue with.  Ahead of us was a bizarre tangle of road planning gone wrong, layers and snarls of over- and under- and side-passes, figure-eights, clover-leaf junctions, and all the other freeway intersections that I'm sure had names but that I just as surely didn't know.  The entire pile of pillars and pilings and pavement seemed to stretch for miles.
"What do we do, now that we've found this place?" I asked, my breathing under better control.
"We get in there before they wake up," said Brie, smiling, and she was off running again.
"Crap," I said, jogging after her slowly, but catching her smile around my own mouth where it tugged at a laugh from inside me.  "What do you do when an overpass wakes up?"


I clung to the cement barrier like my life depended on it.  It probably didn't, but even after the light post incident, I still wasn't completely sure I couldn't die in the City.
"Isn't this GREAT?" shouted Brie over the rush of the wind.
I just laughed and shook my head.  We were braced against a line of cement blocks that marked the edge of an unfinished highway overpass--an overpass that was rushing through the City at what must have been sixty-miles-per-hour, enough to make my eyes water and blow the air back into my lungs as I tried to breathe out.
     I guess I'd found out what you do when an overpass wakes up.
     We had followed the crowd to find our particular overpass.  As we pushed our way into the chaos of roads and spans and bridges, I'd soon seen that we weren't the only ones headed to wherever we were going.  We'd passed one gentleman pushing a walker who smiled at me amiably and shuffled along as fast as he could.  A teenager with what must have been a five-year-old girl clinging to his back was galloping like a horse as she whooped with him.  People came from all directions--not too many, but enough to make me think Brie might really know where she was going--and we were all converging on a ramp that led to a stretch of highway that separated off to another ramp and finally to a dead end.
     "The sign says 'Road Closed,'" I said to Brie when she finally let me catch up.
     "Exactly," she said, breathing hard enough that I started to feel okay about my own raspy ins and outs.  "Isn't it exciting?"
     "But what do we do here?"
     "Shh," she said.  "Listen.  Can you feel it?"
     I had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling.  Short of breath?  I was there.  A little nervous?  A little excited?  Yes to both of those, actually.  The moon was still so immense overhead, stars twirling, the wind swirling blue and a bit cold where we stood.  Brie was still looking at me and smiling, so I took a deep breath or three and tried to see what there was to feel.
     I felt it first through my feet.  There was a slight vibration that I finally realized wasn't the result of running too far on legs that weren't used to the concept.  The cement under us was quivering.  Then it wasn't.  Then it was again.
     I looked up at Brie.  She smiled even more broadly and nodded.  "You can feel it," she said.
   "What is that?" I asked.
   "Snoring."
   "You're not serious."
     "Come ON," she said, grabbing my hand and pulling me along.  Something inside me was delighted that she had taken my hand again--the first time since I'd screwed things up with her, so maybe things were going right again--and part of me was a but put off by the fact that we were running toward a cliff.  A snoring cliff.
     That was, in effect, what the edge of that unfinished overpass was.  When we joined the other crazy people at the cement barricades that lined the completed segment of road, Brie leaned out and looked down.  I followed her example and scooted right back.
     "Are you NUTS?" I asked.
     "Crazy, huh?" she said.
     "How did we get up so high?"  I couldn't imagine it.  We must have been six or seven stories up, and I didn't remember running UP that much.
     "Some of the roads we came on were awake already.  They moved us along while we were getting here.  Be grateful: it means you didn't have to run as far."
     "I'll be grateful from over here, if that's okay."
     "What's the matter, Perry?  Scared of heights?"
     "Should I try to be manly here?"
     Brie put on a serious face.  "Always be manly, young man."
     "In that case, then yes.  I'm scared of heights."
     She laughed.  "How is admitting that 'manly?'"
     "Real men are always honest, aren't they?"
     Brie just looked at me.  "I guess so," she said finally.
     The road under us shook, not the slight tremor of the snores, but a real, honest-to-goodness earthquake kind of shaking.  Someone too close to the edge when it happened fell off.  I felt the air go out of my lungs as they tipped and disappeared, but the scream that floated up from beyond the edge was delighted, not terrified--and then it was gone.
     "Is he okay?" I asked.
     "Relax, Perry," said Brie.  "It's just a dream.  Grab hold and LEAN."
     I followed her example, though a bit reluctantly, and soon I was braced against the cement barrier with my feet, my hands locked around some steel rebar that poked up over the blocks, leaning out over a tangle of roads that was now looking like it was seven or eight stories below me.  Around us other people had taken similar positions.  The man with the walker had somehow caught up with us and was being helped into a harness that tied onto the rebar and leaned him out even further than we were managing.  The teenager was still galloping around, the girl on his shoulders now.
     "This is insane," I said.
     Brie smiled at me.  "Isn't it great?"
     That's when the overpass REALLY woke up.
     Around me, fifty voices shouted together as the entire roadway began to move.  At first I felt it as wind in my face, then looking down I saw that the bends and turns of road below us were moving under me and out of sight, new curls coming closer.  Beneath us there was a massive, rolling, bass boom, then another, and another.  Buildings in the distance to either side were crawling by, then the wind picked up and the buildings were sweeping by.
     "What's that noise?" I shouted to Brie.
     "Cement pillars," she shouted back.  "The overpass puts down new ones to support itself."
     Another boom, and I felt it through my arms and legs.  Stars plunged down from the sky to swirl around us, mixing with the blue wind in a surreal dance of silver and cold.  I realized I was shouting along with everyone else, laughing in the face of this immense force of steel and cement that was rushing through the night to the slow, crushing rhythm of its newly-made feet.  It could crush me in an instant, throw me off and leave me behind, too small to be noticed--if it weren't all a dream.
     Off to the side a group of kids, older than us by a few years, had taken up a chant.  They were clustered around a break in the cement barrier, and as the chant gained in speed and intensity, one teenager in an oversized coat came sprinting through the crowd, hurtling himself at an angle off the edge of the overpass and into the air.  The crowd cheerd as he fell, comically windmilling his arms, and then he was gone beneath the lip of the surging road, left behind in the speed of our onward rush.
     "They're nuts, too!" I shouted.
     "Absolutely," yelled Brie, "but this is a dream.  Aren't we all crazy in dreams?"
   I had no answer to that, so I just smiled at her, leaned into the wind, and screamed as the night rushed by, blue and silver and completely mad.


     "Admit it," said Brie, "that was fun."
     "Okay, it was fun.  But I still think those kids who threw themselves off the overpass were crazy."
     "Bat-snarfed-crazy," agreed Brie.
     "'Bat-snarfed?'"
     "Bat-snarfed."
     "What does that even mean?" I asked.
     "Who cares?" she laughed, spinning as we walked.  We were someplace far across the City from where we had started, wherever we had climbed down to when the overpass had finally slowed and settled back into a quiet, bass purr of contentment.
     I watched Brie as she spun.  The sleeves of her hoodie were too long and hung down over her hands, leaving only the tips of her fingers sticking out into the night.  She was looking up at the sky, skipping and dancing.  I felt like skipping a bit, too.  Riding an overpass does remarkable things to a body's adrenaline levels.
     It also makes teenage girls look beautiful.
     "Does that happen every night?" I asked, because I wanted to hear Brie talk more.
     "Who knows?" she said, settling enough to walk next to me.  "I don't go every night, but I could feel it was going to happen today, and then I found you, and I had to show you.  Sometimes people do too much talking.  Sometimes we just have to DO things."
     "I like doing things with you," I said.  I was surprised that I said it, but there it was.  Something I never could have squeeked out during the day, and I'd said it out loud, clear as the night sky.
     Brie looked at my eyes.  "I like doing things with you, too," she said.
     I swallowed.  "Maybe we should keep doing things together."
     "I'd like that," she said.
     We walked for a while, not saying anything.  My hands were in my pockets, mostly because I wanted to hold Brie's hand and I didn't dare, even as good as I felt in the City.  The street we walked down was quiet, lit by the glow of televisions in shop windows--walls and walls of them--all playing scenes from some nature show about China.  It was as close to walking through a Chinese landscape as you could get in the middle of Urban concrete.
     "Perry," said Brie.  
     "Present," I said.
     "I've been thinking," she continued, looking at the ground in front of her.  "We don't have to hang out during the day."
     "But I want--"
     She cut me off with a glance.  "I saw how uncomfortable you were today, hanging out at lunch--no, don't talk, Perry.  My turn.  I know you were trying your best, and Mike and Sook are really nice, but you were never quite comfortable with it all.  And that's okay.  You don't have to be.  I mean, we have the City, and we can meet up here, and you won't have to feel all tangled up and unhappy.  You can have fun," she said, looking at me, "and I can be with you."
     I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything.
     "Does that sound all right?" she asked after a bit.
     "You know I'm not unhappy because of you," I said.
     She nodded.  "I know that."
     "I'm kind of unhappy all the time.  Not 'kind of.'  I'm unhappy all the time when I'm awake.  Actually, when I'm with you is about the closest I get to being really happy."
     "I'm glad," said Brie.
     "I wish I were different somehow when I'm awake, but I get all gummed up inside, like I need an oil change and my motor doesn't run right--"
     "Perry," interrupted Brie.
     "What?"
     "Shut up."
     "Yes, ma'am."
     "We can hang out at night, and during the day we just see how it goes.  Okay?"
     "Okay," I said.
     "Besides," she said, smiling brightly again, "wasn't tonight fun?"
     "Tonight was amazing," I said.